Quote

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.

I guess I never grew up. I was still reading kids' books in high school and college. I was always interested in writing or illustrating children's books, and I started collecting out-of-print books when I was about 10 years old.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.

I can't imagine my life without books. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was a public school teacher. Books were an integral part of my childhood.

In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren't educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a 'Reader's Digest' condensed book. Can you imagine?

I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.